What is CRM?
A Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM for short, helps you store all the information related to your clients and prospects in a central repository that makes it easy to access and analyze at any time. This is more than a contacts management software.
The true power of a CRM system is in helping you understand your clients better to use that information to run targeted marketing campaigns to increase your leads and improve your win ratio. The automation options make this an easier and a more efficient process.
The data and insights that the CRM system will generate will help you and your teams to grow sales, reduce go-to-market time, and explore new cross-sell opportunities with existing clients. At the heart of the benefit of using such a system is that you are removing all the guess work in marketing campaigns, client interactions, and creating accurate proposals and quotes.
Why Professional Services firms should start using CRM?
The Professional Services industry is faced with long sales cycles because clients need to consider multiple factors before making a decision. That is why it is important to build those relationships and continually show your firm’s value in every stage of the buying process. You need to constantly communicate how your services are best suited to your clients’ needs and this message needs to be consistent across different touch points.
If you are working on multiple short-term projects with a client, it becomes necessary to efficiently track all the projects, contracts, new proposals, quotes, and all other related documentation.
Having a single system to manage all your communications, documentations, and deliverables in a single source of truth will make the entire process from lead generation to service delivery efficient and process-driven instead of having scattered information and people-led processes that can feel chaotic and overwhelming.
Growing professional services firms need to look beyond spread sheets, physical records, and notes keeping. While this would have worked well in a smaller setup with fewer clients, it can become a very time consuming and inefficient process as the firm grows.
Your people are your most valuable resource, and they should not be spending too much time on mundane activities when these tasks can be automated and done more efficiently on the cloud. This way, your team will have the free time they need to do what’s most important – grow the business.
What can you do with CRM for Professional Services?
Professional Services firms that want to grow need to have an automated process to generate leads. Relying on personal relationships alone to get business may not help you scale at a pace you want. With a CRM, you will be able to generate high quality leads, improve conversion rates, and optimize the end-to-end process based on the feedback from deals that sales team are able to close.
While CRM may seem like a system that is mostly used by marketing, the fact is that sales teams also can derive a lot of value from it. Imagine the sales team having access to all the information about a prospect and their needs on their fingertips before they walk into a meeting, instead of having to discover them during the meeting. The insights will give sales teams the confidence they need and that understanding of the clients’ needs will come through in the meeting, which will make an impression on the clients and help you close the deal.
There are many CRM solutions available for Professional Services firms. One option you should consider is Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Why consultants prefer Dynamics 365 CRM for professional services?
The CRM modules from Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help you manage leads, create accurate quotes, keep track of contracts, generate custom reports, and send invoices to clients. If you are using other Microsoft solutions like Outlook and Microsoft 365, all your data will be seamlessly integrated across these different solutions.
The flexibility offered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows you to customize the solution to meet the specific needs of the Professional Services industry and the unique needs of your business. Since Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based solution, you will be able to scale up or scale down as per your need and only pay for what you use.
Choosing a solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 means that your business will be future-ready with new functionality that will be added in the cloud regularly.
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